Monday, February 15, 2010

Death Will Become You, and Me, Too

It has come to my attention that the delicate, and oh so conscientious, sensibilities of millions of Americans were offended this week when they were "forced" to watch the gruesome death of Georgian luger Nodar Kumaritashvili during the opening ceremonies Friday.

My bullshit hand just went into epileptic seizures.

Is this the same audience of Americans that has fetishized stylized depictions of death to the point of absurdity (CSI: Insert city here)? I very rarely turn on a television, except during football season, and unless I'm seeing different commercials than everyone else on the planet, a whole lot of Americans love to see depictions of other human beings being tortured and suffering and dying in grotesque ways.

I haven't heard a whole lot of complaint about that lately.

And am I mistaken, or is our country engaged in at least two wars (that we know about) that require our fellow citizens to both kill and sometimes be killed by people that don't like us?

Yes, I'm certain I saw a movie about that on the American Idol network.

Are we also the same society that in a very real way decides who lives and who dies in impoverished regions of the world by either offering food, medicine and monetary aid, or withholding it? A society where two-thirds of us support the death penalty? A society that just can't seem to see enough violent and cruel depictions of psychopaths torturing and maiming our fellow humans (Saw 1-infinity, Hostel etc)?

But when a man died last week defying death and his particular case of failing to defy death was shown to America millions of Americans were outraged.

Which shocks me because I'm surprised anyone in this dumbed-down, numbed-up dystopic nightmare of a society can feel anything at all, let alone outrage.

But maybe I'm on to something.

Bullshit hand twitching again.

Maybe they didn't feel anything. Maybe they're feigning outrage. Maybe they saw something they thought should elicit some emotion in them, but not knowing what it was, instead of plumbing the depths of their humanity to figure out what it was, just turned their anger outwards at whoever it was that "forced" them to be victimized by this atrocity.

I think what people are actually angry about is the uninvited intrusion into the daydream that the corporacracy has drilled into their brain. The warm cocoon of ignorance and pre-packaged distractions that never allows in reality. What they're outraged about is feeling at all. Human emotion is so rare these days they don't even know how to define it. So they call it outrage.

You're not outraged.

You're not capable of it.

You want to pick and choose what offends you in a world where the most heinous and unimaginable atrocities are occurring at this very moment to innocent people. You want to hide behind your brain-stealing television monitor, probably watching some glorified story about the unimaginable death of some human being, and tell me you're offended.

I'm offended.

We need more death. More realistic depictions of death and disease and poverty and starvation and the awful conditions that plague most of the humans alive on this planet right now.

We need, and deserve, the right to see OUR soldiers after they've been killed in what they believe is a defense of our way of life. How dare you minimize their sacrifice by refusing to look. What's beneath that flag is what you should be honoring, not the symbol.

But we're not looking anymore. And the media isn't going to make us look. So, we have this Pollyanna attitude that if we keep our noses buried in the ass of this corrupt and bloated reach-around we call America, death will just pass us by.

A man died. A man who was engaged in a death-defying sport. It was a sad death. Wasn't tragic. Tragic is reserved for the noble and the innocent who didn't court it, deserve it, or see it coming. None of our deaths will be tragic, because almost none of our lives are epic. Live with it.